This chapter discusses the political contexts of Arnold Schoenberg’s life in the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (c.1889–1922). The rulers of that empire, members of the Habsburg Dynasty, faced a number of crucial challenges that they ultimately were unable to overcome. These included numerous military defeats of course, but also internal dynastic problems relating to overstretched resources, Italian Unification and shifting attitudes toward religion and the Papacy, and a dynastic shift in its male members’ policies toward women. Schoenberg experienced the end of more than 600 years of Habsburg rule in Austria. This epochal shift would have consequences for his thought and music.

The demons loosed in 1559–1561 transformed the French monarchy and hastened the arrival of a new rhetoric of politics, soon to be built around “the State” [l’Estat]. Practical political crises, such as the capture of John II, had often accelerated rapid changes in practice, theory, and justification, and I would argue did so precisely in that order. John’s capture led to the most fundamental change in the history of the French monarchy – permanent taxation – and, under his son Charles V, to a new monarchical discourse seeking to legitimize it. Permanent taxation required both a theoretical foundation and a public justification: that Charles V’s subjects rankled at this innovation is obvious from the events of 1380–1382. Charles V’s new discourse emphasized the “chose publique” of the kingdom of France; the “bien de la chose publique” lasted for nearly two centuries as the monarchy’s key justificatory phrase. After rampant rhetorical confusion between the 1560s and the 1590s, the neologism “bien de l’Estat” permanently took its place, as French (and other) monarchs sought to convince their subjects that the State was the new form of the res publica.